Law school needed?

Let's take a look at the whole picture before deciding that Alaska needs a law school.

Law schools Outside generally do a fine job training the members of the Alaska bar. Indeed, the bar is enriched by the variety of law schools its members represent.

More pressing than the need for a law school in Alaska is the need to address the current maldistribution of legal services across the state. We have plenty of lawyers (2,357 currently active in the state and another crop ready to take the bar exam at the end of this month). What we don't have is a way to assure consistent availability of legal services in the more remote areas of our state. More than 1,800 of the active lawyers practice in the Third Judicial District (Anchorage and south-central).

We have a second problem. Alaska is not doing nearly as well as it used to in addressing the needs of folks who cannot afford legal services. This is the population that faces the most intractable kinds of legal problems, precisely because of their precarious economic status.

Home-growing our lawyers would require an enormous outlay of resources. First let's commit a modest portion of those resources to improving delivery of the ample legal services we already have.